James M. McPherson, "Ante-bellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question," Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 3-23.

SYNOPSIS:

McPherson suggested that the North was exceptional in its development, while the South "resembled a majority of the societies in the world." (22) McPherson compared Northern and Southern "urbanization, industrialization, labor force, demographic structure, violence and martial values, education, and attitudes toward change." He found compelling differences that were increasing over time. McPherson agreed with David Potter's thesis of Southern distinctiveness as a result of its "folk culture." This "gemeinschaft culture," McPherson argued, emphasized kinship, agricultural life, tradition, social hierarchy, deference, and honor. The North by contrast was moving toward a "gesellschaft culture"--"impersonal, bureaucratic, meritocratic, urbanizing, commercial, industrializing, mobile, and rootless." (12)

EXCERPT:

"The North--along with a few countries in northwestern Europe--hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial-capitalism that many Southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past." (22)

"The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North's had. With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the Founding Fathers--a government of limited powers that protected the rights of property, including slave property, and whose constituency comprised an independent gentry and yeomanry of the white race undisturbed by large cities, heartless factories, restless free workers, and class conflict. The accession of the Republican party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had turned irrevocably toward this frightening future." (22)

RELATIONSHIP:

We agree with some aspects of McPherson's emphasis on divergence between the North and the South. The school system in Augusta, for example, was not as well developed as in Franklin. McPherson, however, emphasized a larger "conflict of civilizations" in which the North was moving forward while the South was stuck in the past. We argue that the Southern community, far from stuck, was modernizing as aggressively as the Northern community, developing its institutions around a social logic dominated by slavery. There was indeed a "conflict of civilizations," but that conflict was based directly on slavery, not in the mediating abstraction of "modernity."